Drakensang - Dev Diary #9 @ Drakensang.info

May 25th, 2007, 14:52

The latest Drakensang developer's diary, dealing with combat this time, has been posted for your reading pleasure. Here's part of the introduction.

Today’s dev diary is about the development of the combat system in Drakensang. As always, the designers have certain demands on what the combat system should look like. In addition we, the coders, incorporate our own ideas in that process.
Image
Please note that selection markers and lifebars are not final yet.

A couple of features were essential for us:

* Both technical and cinematic combat scenes
* Round-based TDE rule set
* The least text as possible during combat
* Full control of a four-headed party
* Player can pause at any time

Some good combat concepts explained here, especially fitting the animations into the party turns. This is one of the dev' diaries better topics from an "informing the gamers" point of view compared to say the Tatzelwurm topic (dev-diary #6) and other graphics related topics, because ever-evolving combat techniques are becoming more important where strategy moves/logic is concerned.

At first i wasn't so sure about the "filling animations" where waving a sword in the air to appear active while the differing animation lengths run their turn but if it works and doesn't look over conspicuous then it's hard to think of a better 'fill-in' method considering the complexities.

I suspect (but i could be wrong) that a "chance" dice throw or other random anti-equalising algorithm is needed where any double hot spot times are encountered as there must always be one timed animation stroke between two combatants which takes priority….some animations may be allowed to 'overlap'….certainly interesting encounter-animation info'.

That does sound interesting. It reminds me of extra's sword fighting in a battle scene of a movie. I can't say I like it or don't until I play it and see if having different length rounds gets annoying all the time, the game is easy enough where I want combat to be as fast as possible and the animations get old after 5 minutes, or the combat is good and challenging enough where I will set it to pause between rounds so I can actually use some tactics and strategy. We'll see. I'm definitely going to buy this game, but I'll always be a little mad at it.